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The Underlying KWin Improvements In KDE 4.7

05-28-2011, 10:50 AM

Phoronix: The Underlying KWin Improvements In KDE 4.7

Now that the first KDE SC 4.7 beta is available, Martin Gr??lin, the lead developer of the KWin, has blogged about some of the underlying improvements made to the compositing window manager for KDE during this development cycle. Of course, most Phoronix graphics junkies will already know what's changed based upon previous articles, but here's an overview for those not caught up to speed...

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I'm confused why the window manager can't do this automatically if there's a top-level full-screen window at the top of the window stack, and automatically turn compositing back on whenever that condition ends (so volume control overlays and stuff still work without glitches/flickering even when a full-screen GL app is running).

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I'm confused why the window manager can't do this automatically if there's a top-level full-screen window at the top of the window stack, and automatically turn compositing back on whenever that condition ends (so volume control overlays and stuff still work without glitches/flickering even when a full-screen GL app is running).

Exactly my thoughts... Is it so difficult to detect fullscreen programs automatically?

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What i don't understand is WHY there is a need to turn off compositing for fullscreen apps. It sounds like a terrible hack. If all running apps can draw their contents to pixmaps, and the compositor can arrange them all on the screen, what difference should it make if one happens to be really big? I don't see why there is such 'overhead'.

Is this simply a limitation of the current implementation or a real logical issue?

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It just removes a level of indirection and can free up resources that aren't used in case where a fullscreen application is running (remember when compositing that other apps will be rendering themselves to pixmaps - you can get rid of those if you turn compositing off).

This can be helpful if latency is important to the application or the application pushes the hardware to it's limits.